On Correcting Errors in Existing Mathematical Approaches for UAV Trajectory Design Considering No-Fly-Zones

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new constraint for UAV trajectory design that guarantees complete no-fly-zone avoidance, improving safety and throughput in UAV communications.

Contribution

It proposes a novel NFZ constraint ensuring UAVs never violate no-fly-zones and develops an optimization framework to maximize throughput under these constraints.

Findings

The new constraint guarantees NFZ avoidance in all scenarios.

The proposed scheme achieves higher throughput than traditional methods.

Simulation confirms zero NFZ violation and improved performance.

Abstract

Motivated by the fact that current mathematical methods for the trajectory design of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) considering no-fly-zones (NFZs) cannot perfectly avoid NFZs throughout the entire continuous trajectory, this study introduces a new constraint that ensures the complete avoidance of NFZs. Moreover, we provide mathematical proof demonstrating that a UAV operating within the proposed constraints will never violate NFZs. Under the proposed constraint on NFZs, we aim to optimize the scheduling, transmit power, length of the time slot, and the trajectory of the UAV to maximize the minimum throughput among ground nodes without violating NFZs. To find the optimal UAV strategy from the non-convex optimization problem formulated here, we use various optimization techniques, in this case quadratic transform, successive convex approximation, and the block coordinate descent algorithm. Simulation results confirm that the proposed constraint prevents NFZs from being violated over the entire trajectory in any scenario. Furthermore, the proposed scheme shows significantly higher throughput than the baseline scheme using the traditional NFZ constraint by achieving a zero outage probability due to NFZ violations.